Hasta La Ideas

It’s admittedly a far-fetched and kooky transportation design, but the flying quadrotor helicarrier featured in The Avengers, which wasn’t exactly a documentary, captured the imagination of youthful moviegoers earlier this year. It also came to the attention of a certain 40-something modelmaker and RC enthusiast from Arkhangelsk, Russia, who goes by the handle Native18. Google Translator’s done a spotty job, but from what we gather, Native18 is well-known in the Russian RC community, and on this forum, that community discusses Hollywood-designed vehicles and if they can be replicated. The S.H.I.E.L.D. helicarrier challenge was posed to Native18.

Blueprints don’t exactly exist for the thing, so “Nate” had to pull the scene from the movie that best shows the overall vehicle:

From that he was able to break out the following two stills and attempt to reverse-engineer the form.

Next came the modelmaking and construction process (along with a healthy amount of forum debate, in jargon-laced Russian, about what would and wouldn’t fly, literally).

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Budapest DJ Fine Cut Bodies has remixed the first part of the classic Mike Oldfield album Tubular Bells. The track is a competition entry for an Indaba Music remix contest to commemorate the release of the original record, and you can listen to the other remixes the track is up against here.

Make sure you also check out the excellent Fine Cut Bodies remix of Fever Ray track Keep the Streets Empty for Me that we featured on Dezeen Music Project back in June.

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The post Dezeen Music Project: Tubular Bells (remix)
by Fine Cut Bodies appeared first on Dezeen.

We’ve seen plenty of bike lights in the past couple years, listed below for reference, including two of the four winners for the Transportation category of the Core77 Design Awards (Project Aura last year and Revolights this year). While removable lights are far and away the most popular solution, as they’re cheap and pocketable, but designers continue to up the ante with wheel-mounted LEDs or otherwise integrated lights that are at once more secure and more elegant than most commercially available options.

Enter Copenhagen Parts’ Magnetic Bike Light, a discreet illumination solution that offers the best of both worlds: it’s as close as you can get to having built-in lights without actually having to build them in.

It’s an all too common design problem: how do we make something that looks nice and still works as it should? Well, in our case, we kept it simple—but dedicated a long time, nearly 18 months, to refining the product to a point that we were all completed satisfied with the end result.

By combining magnets and LEDs we have created a bike light that looks good, works well and can be fitted and removed instantly… Magnets and steel tubes were an obvious match. We’ve spent countless hours selecting the right components and perfecting the details so that the lights will fit to different frames and stay put. The prototypes have been tested for several months so as to make sure that they:

· Are easy to fit anywhere on the frame
· Have the right angle to optimize visibility to other road-users
· Stay put; regardless of the road surface

Perhaps the most interesting feature is the on/off switch, or lack thereof: the lights are activated when they’re attached to the frame, and they automatically shut off upon removal. The Copenhagen Parts team notes that the rare-earth magnetics should be plenty strong, and the lights run on standard batteries (we’re assuming they take button cells). All of the details can be found on the Magnetic Bike Lights Kickstarter page (vid & related links after the jump).

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Designer and illustrator Craighton Berman, who started the Core77 “Sketchnotes Channel” (as well as drawing Coretoons under the name fueledbycoffee), will be in NYC doing a couple of classes on visual thinking next week. The first is for the new Products of Design MFA program at the School of Visual Arts (headed by Core77 partner and Editor-in-Chief Allan Chochinov). However, if you’re not one of the pioneering students in the inaugural MFA program, don’t fret: an encore performance has been added down the street.

Craighton will also be running a Visual Thinking 101 workshop on Wednesday August 29th at General Assembly, the start-up community/coworking/education network focused on entrepreneurship in technology and design. If you’re curious about how visual thinking might help you to better generate, communicate, and shape ideas—especially in collaborative environments—this workshop will be a great primer to philosophy and techniques. The class will cover the building blocks of visual thinking, basic rapid viz training, sketchnotes, and experience storyboarding. Drawing skills not required at all—just a willingness to use drawing to explore ideas.

Also keep an eye out this Fall for the return of regular posts in the Core77 Sketchnotes channel, with articles on digital sketchnotes, brainstorming, storyboarding, graphic facilitation, and book reviews of recent books on sketchnotes and visual thinking at large. In the meantime, keep the pens moving and the ink flowing.

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Reebok has long staked a claim to a slice of the sports market, and though it’s appreciably smaller than that of the major players, the Canton, MA-based company has managed to stay in the game even as their competitors duke it out in an arms race to sign superstars and rack up medals, both literally and metaphorically. But what’s the next step for a brand best known for now-nostalgic Pumps and the aerobics fad?

All images courtesy of Gensler Architects unless otherwise noted

We found out last week, at the grand opening of their first dedicated retail space in the U.S.: in an effort to make the most of their resurgence within the CrossFit community, the Canton, MA-based company is pleased to present the Reebok Fit Hub, a combination store and gym. (The CrossFit phenomenon is a bit too involved to explain here; the uninitiated can learn more at CrossFit.com.) Where Reebok’s products are designed to meet the performance needs of occasional gym-goer and diehard CrossFitter alike, the Fit Hub caters to all variety of customer—the Fifth Avenue storefront has attracted a healthy mix of curious tourists, local passersby and fitness gurus.

The staff, of course, is comprised of the latter type: Reebok has made a concerted effort to hire individuals who are passionate about fitness, including trainers and health experts who can provide offer far more guidance than your average salesperson. Moreover, the Fit Hub is the only place to find much of the product, which was previously only available online, to the benefit of the burgeoning NYC CrossFit community.

Reebok called on Ziba to design the retail concept, which allows for flexible displays and fixtures precisely because much of the furniture and hardware was inspired by the gymnasium setting. The hard lines of metal and masonite are mitigated mostly by strategically-placed product and color blocking; nary a sheet of plywood is fully painted; playful details are more subtle still (astute visitors will have to find these for themselves). Yet there’s no denying the functionality of the wall-mounted rigs, which can be reconfigured for different products, or the step-like stools in the footwear section have the same cutout handles as the actual workout equipment downstairs.

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